Informed K12
We’re on a mission to help school district administrators improve operational efficiency and gain insight into their most critical school business processes.
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What we do
Everything we do at Informed K12 starts with an unwavering commitment to the people who run our nation’s school systems. They are the administrators who work behind the scenes yet are the lifeblood of their district. While the pressures and expectations of their jobs grow every year, they lose up to a quarter of their time on repetitive administrative tasks.
Still today, most school districts have hundreds of mission critical processes that run on paper, making visibility and improvement near impossible. In short, we are transforming paperwork from a daily stumbling block to a strategic tool. In doing so, we are powering the future of school district operations, enabling administrators to gain the operational insights that drive productivity, accountability and equity.
What guides us
Our values guide both our short-term decisions and long-term strategy. They define how we interact with each other, our customers, and the community we live in.
Our Values
Build, don’t disrupt We seek to deeply understand and build long-term value for our districts; we don’t strive to “disrupt” or break things in the traditional Silicon Valley sense.
Unreasonable quality, uncommon results We place a high premium on quality because we understand the important impact our work has on districts.
People first We care about our district partners and each other as people, we seek out diversity of background and experience, and we show up as our authentic selves.
Know when to go rogue We’re not afraid to think for ourselves and break from traditional wisdom in order to find what works in our context.
Who we are
We are a driven and diverse team committed to building a more efficient and equitable education system. Our founders, Sarah and Qian, met at Stanford's Learning and Design program. There, they discovered a mutual passion for technology that scales impact in the education system. Inspired by Sarah's work in Providence Public Schools, they saw an opportunity to reduce administrative waste and direct resources to where they are needed most. In 2012, they started Informed K12.
What we are like
Everyone has a growth mindset. We encourage team critiques to improve our skill sets and processes. And we’re eager to reflect on our personal, and company, growth. We can bring our whole selves to work. We’re equally valued, trusted, and respected exactly as we are. We talk about everything – from #dadjokes to #socialjustice.
How we work
- Collaborate & communicate: All teams have an open door policy. We'd like everyone to understand how our business works – from application scalability to lead generation.
- Always learning, never finished: We're leaders and learners. We hold regular book clubs, hack days, and discussions to learn about topics we care about. Everything is iterative.
- Work as a team: We set goals, share kudos and hold each other accountable through coaching, peer feedback, retrospectives, and team retreats.
- Focus on customers Every team interacts with our customers. From onsite visits to support rotations to webinars, we focus on customers first.
Why you'll love working here
We’re building a company at the same time that we’re building a product. This starts with a strong feedback culture to foster an informed, resilient and healthy team. We invest our time in annual retreats, monthly happy hours, and regular discussions on topics ranging from SaaS business metrics to improving diversity in the workplace.
What it's like on our engineering team
We work in small, nimble teams of 2-3 engineers. Projects that each team takes on range from real-time search and export tools, database and server optimization, or building our front end system. Teams rotate regularly so you’ll be working with different people every few sprints.
We’re proud of our ability to be full stack. We all have preferences for different parts of the stack, but we all share responsibility for and are empowered to improve our entire platform. This commitment also encourages us to grow in areas we’re less familiar with.
We take code quality seriously and are constantly improving our codebase. Every project we work on has dedicated time to address tech debt and we prioritize code quality initiatives on our product road map. Oh, and we never ship code without writing a full suite of tests (don’t worry, we’ll help in case this is newer to you)!
We strive for light and flexible processes. Each team decides how they’ll get work done, but we try to ensure that working solo, together, or even remotely are all equally effective. Daily standups, sprintly retrospectives, paired programming, randomly assigned code reviews, and “mob reviews” of larger changes are some of the practices we use.
We believe that making great products requires collaboration and empathy. Not only do we work closely with our product and design teams, we make it a point to pay regular visits to our customers. To better understand the challenges our customers are facing, every few months we’ll spend a week directly supporting our client success team.
We are focused on creating a great work environment. Most of all, we work hard to make an environment where honest feedback, mutual respect, and personal growth are valued. We want to make sure everyone feels comfortable bringing their whole self to work.